History and Specifications

The Radeon Pro Duo had an interesting history. Originally shown as an unbranded, dual-GPU PCB during E3 2015, which took place last June, AMD touted it as the ultimate graphics card for both gamers and professionals. At that time, the company thought that an October launch was feasible, but that clearly didn’t work out. When pressed for information in the Oct/Nov timeframe, AMD said that they had delayed the product into Q2 2016 to better correlate with the launch of the VR systems from Oculus and HTC/Valve.

During a GDC press event in March, AMD finally unveiled the Radeon Pro Duo brand, but they were also walking back on the idea of the dual-Fiji beast being aimed at the gaming crowd, even partially. Instead, the company talked up the benefits for game developers and content creators, such as its 8192 stream processors for offline rendering, or even to aid game devs in the implementation and improvement of multi-GPU for upcoming games.

Anyone that pays attention to the graphics card market can see why AMD would make the positional shift with the Radeon Pro Duo. The Fiji architecture is on the way out, with Polaris due out in June by AMD’s own proclamation. At $1500, the Radeon Pro Duo will be a stark contrast to the prices of the Polaris GPUs this summer, and it is well above any NVIDIA-priced part in the GeForce line. And, though CrossFire has made drastic improvements over the last several years thanks to new testing techniques, the ecosystem for multi-GPU is going through a major shift with both DX12 and VR bearing down on it.

So yes, the Radeon Pro Duo has both RADEON and PRO right there in the name. What’s a respectable PC Perspective graphics reviewer supposed to do with a card like that if it finds its way into your office? Test it of course! I’ll take a look at a handful of recent games as well as a new feature that AMD has integrated with 3DS Max called FireRender to showcase some of the professional chops of the new card.

The Dual-Fiji Card Finally Arrives

This weekend, leaks of information on both WCCFTech and VideoCardz.com have revealed all the information about the pending release of AMD’s dual-GPU giant, the Radeon Pro Duo. While no one at PC Perspective has been briefed on the product officially, all of the interesting data surrounding the product is clearly outlined in the slides on those websites, minus some independent benchmark testing that we are hoping to get to next week. Based on the report from both sites, the Radeon Pro Duo will be released on April 26th.

The design of the card follows the same industrial design as the reference designs of the Radeon Fury X, and integrates a dual-pump cooler and external fan/radiator to keep both GPUs running cool.

Based on the slides leaked out today, AMD has revised the Radeon Pro Duo design to include a set of three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI port. This was a necessary change as the Oculus Rift requires an HDMI port to work; only the HTC Vive has built in support for a DisplayPort connection and even in that case you would need a full-size to mini-DisplayPort cable.

The 8GB of HBM (high bandwidth memory) on the card is split between the two Fiji XT GPUs on the card, just like other multi-GPU options on the market. The 350 watts power draw mark is exceptionally high, exceeded only by AMD’s previous dual-GPU beast, the Radeon 295X2 that used 500+ watts and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z that draws 375 watts!

Here is the specification breakdown of the Radeon Pro Duo. The card has 8192 total stream processors and 128 Compute Units, split evenly between the two GPUs. You are getting two full Fiji XT GPUs in this card, an impressive feat made possible in part by the use of High Bandwidth Memory and its smaller physical footprint.

Radeon Pro Duo

R9 Nano

R9 Fury

R9 Fury X

GTX 980 Ti

TITAN X

GTX 980

R9 290X

GPU

Fiji XT x 2

Fiji XT

Fiji Pro

Fiji XT

GM200

GM200

GM204

Hawaii XT

GPU Cores

8192

4096

3584

4096

2816

3072

2048

2816

Rated Clock

up to 1000 MHz

up to 1000 MHz

1000 MHz

1050 MHz

1000 MHz

1000 MHz

1126 MHz

1000 MHz

Texture Units

512

256

224

256

176

192

128

176

ROP Units

128

64

64

64

96

96

64

64

Memory

8GB (4GB x 2)

4GB

4GB

4GB

6GB

12GB

4GB

4GB

Memory Clock

500 MHz

500 MHz

500 MHz

500 MHz

7000 MHz

7000 MHz

7000 MHz

5000 MHz

Memory Interface

4096-bit (HMB) x 2

4096-bit (HBM)

4096-bit (HBM)

4096-bit (HBM)

384-bit

384-bit

256-bit

512-bit

Memory Bandwidth

1024 GB/s

512 GB/s

512 GB/s

512 GB/s

336 GB/s

336 GB/s

224 GB/s

320 GB/s

TDP

350 watts

175 watts

275 watts

275 watts

250 watts

250 watts

165 watts

290 watts

Peak Compute

16.38 TFLOPS

8.19 TFLOPS

7.20 TFLOPS

8.60 TFLOPS

5.63 TFLOPS

6.14 TFLOPS

4.61 TFLOPS

5.63 TFLOPS

Transistor Count

8.9B x 2

8.9B

8.9B

8.9B

8.0B

8.0B

5.2B

6.2B

Process Tech

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

MSRP (current)

$1499

$499

$549

$649

$649

$999

$499

$329

The Radeon Pro Duo has a rated clock speed of up to 1000 MHz. That’s the same clock speed as the R9 Fury and the rated “up to” frequency on the R9 Nano. It’s worth noting that we did see a handful of instances where the R9 Nano’s power limiting capability resulted in some extremely variable clock speeds in practice. AMD recently added a feature to its Crimson driver to disable power metering on the Nano, at the expense of more power draw, and I would assume the same option would work for the Pro Duo.

The AMD R9 Fury X, Fury, and Nano have all been released, but a dual-GPU Fiji XT card could be on the way soon according to a new report.

Back in June at AMD's E3 event we were shown Project Quantum, AMD's concept for a powerful dual-GPU system in a very small form-factor. It was speculated that the system was actually housing an unreleased dual-GPU graphic card, which would have made sense given the very small size of the system (and mini-ITX motherboard therein). Now a report from WCCFtech is pointing to a manifest that just might be a shipment of this new dual-GPU card, and the code-name is Gemini.

"Gemini is the code-name AMD has previously used in the past for dual GPU variants and surprisingly, the manifest also contains another phrase: ‘Tobermory’. Now this could simply be a reference to the port that the card shipped from...or it could be the actual codename of the card, with Gemini just being the class itself."

The manifest also indicates a Cooler Master cooler for the card, the maker of the liquid cooling solution for the Fury X. As the Fury X has had its share of criticism for pump whine issues it would be interesting to see how a dual-GPU cooling solution would fare in that department, though we could be seeing an entirely new generation of the pump as well. Of course speculation on an unreleased product like this could be incorrect, and verifiable hard details aren't available yet. Still, of the dual-GPU card is based on a pair of full Fiji XT cores the specs could be very impressive to say the least:

Core: Fiji XT x2

Stream Processors: 8192

GCN Compute Units: 128

ROPs: 128

TMUs: 512

Memory: 8 GB (4GB per GPU)

Memory Interface: 4096-bit x2

Memory Bandwidth: 1024 GB/s

In addition to the specifics above the report also discussed the possibility of 17.2 TFLOPS of performance based on 2x the performance of Fury X, which would make the Gemini product one of the most powerful single-card GPU solutions in the world. The card seems close enough to the final stage that we should expect to hear something official soon, but for now it's fun to speculate - unless of course the speculation concerns a high initial retail price, and unfortunately something at or above $1000 is quite likely. We shall see.